Sunday, November 10, 2013

I've been adding support for Dropbox to FTP On The Go! Because it needs full access so you can upload any file from your Dropbox, or download a file to any folder, it has to use the low level "Core"API.

The code from Dropbox is good, but uses delegates for everything. I didn't want to have lots of checks for "file download complete" to see what to do with it next--edit/view, email it, upload it to an FTP server, or any of the other things. With several operations potentially happening at the same time, that could get confusing :)

So I made a little wrapper for the DBRestClient to do Blocks. The code for getting the metadata, like a folder's contents or details about a file, is below. There are similar functions for all the other things, uploading or downloading files, etc. I'll post all that once the new version of FTP is out. (But as you can see it's a dozen or so lines of code for each one you'd want to do so pretty easy to add yourself.)

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

If you make an iPad Pro, with a bigger screen, what does that really mean to the pixels?

You can either keep the same 2048x1536 size of the current iPads and make bigger pixels or do a new screen resolution.

Keeping the same 2048x1536 pixels lets you make anything you'd want and every app works as-is. Just like the non-transition from iPad to iPad mini where everything just worked, the pixels would simply be bigger rather than smaller. But bigger pixels will start to get below Apple's magic Retina numbers.

Instead you could also increase the resolution. The next nice "computer" numbers up that keep the same aspect ratio would be 2560x1920.

You could again make those pixels any size you want. If you use exactly the same size pixels as the iPad Air, you go from a screen rectangle of 7.76" high by 5.82"wide up to about 9.7" by 7.28" which gets you a diagonal of around 12.13". That seems a little big, but again you could make new LCD panels whatever size you want. But it's in the ballpark for the screen size from various rumor websites.

Existing apps would run as-is, with a black border, much like iPhone-only apps on an iPad, or "short" apps on an iPhone 5 with the taller screen. Apps that were boxed in wouldn't look as good, but they would work fine. The pixels (so buttons and such) are the about/exactly same size as the iPad Air, so it would all be usable as apps get updated.

Where it gets even more interesting is if you make an iPad with the pixel size of the iPad mini, but make it that new 2560x1920 pixel count. By my math, you'd end up with a screen that is 7.85" x 5.89" which is within fractions of an inch of the size of the current iPad Air screen (7.76" x 5.82"). That seems like the iPad Air 2 next year.

So if you do an iPad Pro spring 2014, with a bigger screen and higher pixel count, apps will get updated. With the bigger device, apps would be usable at the old size as they're getting updated. Then you can roll that new pixel count back into the iPad Air2 in fall 2014. iPad Air2 gets an even sharper screen, and a nice new differentiator from the iPad mini if it stayed 2048x1536 (which I think it would).

Developers will jump on the Pro so all apps that matter would have been updated by the fall 2014 time. (Many would even get updated in the week or two between the announcement and its release.)

This also gives more choices for updating the models later. Air and Mini updated in the fall in time for the holidays, Pro which would be more a business iPad and gets updated in the spring. Pro could even get a few goodies from current and future iPhones that the fall iPad Air/Mini didn't get...like I'd be very surprised if it didn't have TouchID.

Monday, November 4, 2013

I went to my first Hackathon this weekend. A bunch of people, in teams of up to 5, trying to build something cool that could be the foundation for a company in just 24 hours (or just trying to build something cool or fun in the 24 hour time too.)

I'd brought an idea, for an NSA-proof messaging app. We now know that between spying, hacking, and court orders, just about any connection over the Internet is susceptible to "man in the middle" attacks or all sorts of other monitoring techniques.

My idea, Funsa (or F.U.NSA) was that if you treat the whole Internet as compromised, then the way to communicate securely is to exchange the keys for your messages off the Internet.

I sat down at a table, and happened to get the right people there. An Android developer and web services guy both from Amazon. A woman joined us later who did IT security and was a great researcher and presenter for the team.

We got a working demo for iOS to show. Each device would make a new 2048 bit RSA public/private key pair for a new connection. Then they would exchange the public keys between the two iPhones over Bluetooth. From then on, they could use those keys to send secure messages using a server over the Internet, using the keys they'd exchanged offline.

A real app might use 4096 bit keys (but that could take several minutes to generate on an older iPhone--so we did 2048 for the demo since it "only" takes a few seconds on the new iPhone 5S.)

We talked about all sorts of next steps and other ideas.

Sending the keys using QR codes on the phone screens and front cameras, even sound and squawking like a modem from the 90s.

Lots of features for enterprise like having full source code so they could audit and setup their own controlled messaging servers.

We got to the finals (top 6 out of about 30), but didn't get in the top 3. But many people said that if it was on the name alone, we'd win :)

Pete, Shawn and I talked about finishing it up as a Headlight app. Pete had some great ideas; since he's in London, the bluetooth way of exchanging keys wouldn't work :) The craziest would be to each print out QR codes for the public keys and send them by regular snail-mail to scan on each of our devices across the world!

Offline key exchange wouldn't be new--that's one of the reasons why they invented handcuff briefcases you see in movies :) We didn't find any apps or message systems that used it as the security method for mobile devices.